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If you're anything like many open source enthusiasts, you may have grown up watching science fiction shows like Knight Rider, or Star Trek, or (my personal favorite) Time Trax. What do they have in common? In each, voice is the key medium through which the protagonists interact with a computer. Knight Rider had Kitt, Star Trek had the ubiquitous computer, and even the indefatigable Darrian Lambert in Time Trax had dependable Selma, the holographic assistant. read more

There seems to be a mad rush at the beginning of every year to find ways to be more productive. New Year's resolutions, the itch to start the year off right, and of course, an "out with the old, in with the new" attitude all contribute to this. And the usual round of recommendations is heavily biased towards closed source and proprietary software. It doesn't have to be that way. Here's the ninth of my picks for 19 new (or new-to-you) open source tools to help you be more productive in 2019. read more

Use the Python Netmiko module to automate switches, routers and firewalls from multiple vendors.

Because of the way time is represented in Linux, a signed 32-bit number can't support times beyond January 19, 2038 after 3:14:07 UTC. This Year 2038 (Y2038 or Y2K38) problem is about the time data type representation. The solution is to use 64-bit timestamps. read more

BoltWire is an easy to use content management system that can be used to create personal or business websites which is released as OpenSource software. It is written in PHP language and it doesn't require a database, all its data is stored in the file system.

With the rise of kubernetes and micro-services architecture, being able to quickly write and deploy a RESTful API service is a good skill to have. In this first part of a series of articles, you’ll learn how to use Fedora to build a RESTful application and deploy it on Openshift. Together, we’re going to build […]

News briefs for January 21, 2019.

Of all the computers I've ever owned or used, the one that booted the quickest was from the 1980s; by the time your hand moved from the power switch to the keyboard, the BASIC interpreter was ready for your commands. Modern computers take anywhere from 15 seconds for a laptop to minutes for a small home server to boot. Why is there such a difference in boot times? read more

An open-spec, Allwinner H6 based “Orange Pi 3” SBC has gone on sale for $30 to $40, with the latter giving you 2GB of RAM and 8GB eMMC. Other highlights: GbE, HDMI 2.0, 4x USB 3.0, WiFi-ac, and mini-PCIe. The long-awaited Orange Pi 3 — the highest end of three Allwinner H6 based Orange Pi […]

There seems to be a mad rush at the beginning of every year to find ways to be more productive. New Year's resolutions, the itch to start the year off right, and of course, an "out with the old, in with the new" attitude all contribute to this. And the usual round of recommendations is heavily biased towards closed source and proprietary software. It doesn't have to be that way. Here's the eighth of my picks for 19 new (or new-to-you) open source tools to help you be more productive in 2019. read more

Microsoft to hang up support on 10 December. Microsoft has formally set the end date for support of its all-but-forgotten Windows 10 Mobile platform.…

The Linux mascot is a penguin named Tux, so we thought it appropriate to celebrate Penguin Awareness Day for the conservation of penguin habitats and talk a little bit (more) about Linux. A few fun penguin facts: These furry creatures are flightless yet part of the bird family. Some are large, like the Emperor penguin, and some are small, like those found in New Zealand. And, the Gentoo penguin is known to swim up to a speed of 21 miles per hour! read more

In this edition of our open source news roundup, we look at how scholars are bringing medieval literature into the digital age using open source software, keeping casual contributors to open source projects happy, the release of the Fifth Internet Edition of The Linux Command Line, and more. read more

'The Server Side Public License v1 does not meet standards' MongoDB justified its decision last October to shift the free version of its NoSQL database software, MongoDB Community Server, from the open-source GNU Affero General Public License to the not-quite-so-open Server Side Public License (SSPL) by arguing that cloud providers sell open-source software as a service without giving back.…

There seems to be a mad rush at the beginning of every year to find ways to be more productive. New Year's resolutions, the itch to start the year off right, and of course, an "out with the old, in with the new" attitude all contribute to this. And the usual round of recommendations is heavily biased towards closed source and proprietary software. It doesn't have to be that way. Here's the seventh of my picks for 19 new (or new-to-you) open source tools to help you be more productive in 2019. read more

I want to consider a list of possible distributions that are not only outstanding candidates but also easy to use, and that can serve many functions within your business. In some cases, my choices are drop-in replacements for other operating systems, whereas others require a bit of work to get them up to speed.

The speed and agility of open source projects benefit from lightweight and flexible governance. Their ability to run with such efficient governance is supported by the potential for project forking. That potential provides a discipline that encourages participants to find ways forward in the face of unanticipated problems, changed agendas, or other sources of disagreement among participants. The potential for forking is a benefit that is available in open source projects because all open source licenses provide needed permissions. read more

I'd like to talk a bit about one of the more problematic models out there, the open core model, because it's much more prevalent, and it creates some perverse incentives that run counter to Free Software principles.

Brotli is a generic-purpose lossless compression algorithm that compresses data using a combination of a modern variant of the LZ77 algorithm, Huffman coding and 2nd order context modeling, with a compression ratio comparable to the best currently available general-purpose compression methods. This tutorial shows how to compile Brotli compression library from source on Debian 9 (stretch).

Fedora had an amazing 2018. The distribution saw many improvements with the introduction of Fedora 28 and Fedora 29. Fedora 28 included third party repositories, making it easy to get software like the Steam client, Google Chrome and Nvidia’s proprietary drivers. Fedora 29 brought support for automatic updates for Flatpack. One of the four foundations […]